YMMV / Wagon Train

• Awesome Music: The stirring theme music. Just try not to be moved by it.
• Fair for Its Day: While still painting the settlers as mostly heroic people taming a wilderness, the show did not generally trade in "savage scalping redskin" depictions of Indians, and most characters were written as real people and not as national/ethnic stereotypes.
• Harsher in Hindsight: Whether the Foreshadowing was intentional or not, rewatching "The Andrew Hale Story" can be rather painful. A character with the surname Hale, played by John McIntyre, ends up being thrust into leadership of the train when Major Adams gets sick, and Charlie Wooster even makes a comment about finding a new wagonmaster to work for next year when the slowly-recovering Adams takes his misery out on the poor guy. A year and a half later, he does end up with a new wagonmaster (a man named Hale and played by John McIntyre) due to Ward Bond's death.
• Moral Event Horizon: Town strongman ruler Ben Mattox crosses it in "The Jane Hawkins Story", when he despite learning that not only was Jane Hawkins innocent of the murder of his son Tad, it was his own daughter Laura that did it, still wants Jane hung. His stated reason is that since Laura was trying to kill Jane when it happened, that makes it still Jane's fault. Add to this, Laura did it because she had romantic feelings towards her adopted brother, which he did not return, both for love of Jane and it's implied, because he saw the girl he was raised with only as a sister. Mattox does not care, and it is this last line crossing that finally gives the townsfolk, with the prodding of Flint McCullogh, the spine to overthrow and break Mattox's rule once and for all.
• Parody Displacement: The famous Gene Roddenberry "Wagon Train to the Stars" five word pitch that led to the creation of Star Trek: The Original Series is better known nowadays than Wagon Train itself; a fair few younger viewers frequently assume that the "wagon train" part is referring to a more generic idea of westward settlers rather than a specific show.
• Retroactive Recognition: Kind of. Although Robert Fuller is better known to 70s audiences as Dr. Brackett of Emergency!, he was first and foremost a Western star, and this show was his other well-known role.
• Strangled by the Red String: Bills Hawks describes the title character of "The Lisa Raincloud Story" as his "whole life" after knowing her for just a few days.
• Too Dumb to Live: Clara Reynolds from "The Prairie Story", who freaks out after weeks on the prairie and decides that she wants to go home, alone, with one wagon, across hundreds of miles of prairie with no one around but her and her husband instead of staying with the train. Cue a while later in the episode where an Indian woman walks up wearing the broach that Clara was given as a keepsake, showing that one wagon, alone on the plains, was easy prey for the Indians.

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